Episode 1 - Taylor Otwell

More Than Code

Ben sits down with Taylor Otwell to discuss his personal life, what drives him, how he got started with Laravel, and what's next.

Taylor is the creator of the Laravel PHP framework, conference organizer, and successful entrepreneur.

Transcript -
Ben Edmunds:
I hear you're leaving Laravel to work on Symphony full-time now?

Taylor Otwell:
Heck yeah, man. I got three or four lines of code merged in there. It's pretty crazy that we haven't had to merge anything before. But anyway, yeah, finally got that badge.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. Kind of surprised you haven't had to. Is it that you usually code around it, or you just haven't hit a case where you needed it?

Taylor Otwell:
We just haven't hit a case that we couldn't extend something or tweak something the way we wanted to. The stuff that we mainly use Symphony for is the HTTP request stuff, so the HTTP spec is not something that's changing every day, so it's pretty much stable and we never really have to mess with it.

Ben Edmunds:
Okay. So what was your commit, for those listening?

Taylor Otwell:
They had deprecated being able to ... you have a request come in, and that request has inputs on it, say, from a form. Maybe you have a name one. And there's a middleware, Laravel, that if you get an empty string in an input, it will just change it to "null," and I think the idea behind that is it sort of makes it consistent between your JSON and form endpoints. Anyway, they had deprecated being able to set a request attribute to null. You had to set it to either a string or an array, and so I sort of un-deprecated that in my pull request.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. Cool. So let's start from the beginning, I guess. You're in Arkansas, is that right?

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah.

Ben Edmunds:
Did you grow up there, or how did you end up there?

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, my family have lived in Arkansas since the 1830s, something like that, and around pretty much the same town, Hot Springs, Arkansas, which is the hood home of Bill Clinton, kind of its claim to fame, and also the first national park, actually, in the United States.

Taylor Otwell:
So, I grew up there, went to high school there, and now I just live 30 minutes from there, pretty close to Little Rock, Arkansas, which is the capital of Arkansas. So I've pretty much always been here. I went to college, Arkansas Tech, yeah, so pretty much born and raised right here.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. Did you go to college for CS or what did you go for?

Taylor Otwell:
I went to college for a degree called Information Technology, which is a lot of computer networking type stuff, routers, switches, I had a DBA class, I had two semesters of C++, which is any computer major at that school has to take that, but I didn't do anything beyond those two semesters of C++ programming-wise.

Taylor Otwell:
They had an optional PHP course which I would have taken now, just to see what that was like.

Ben Edmunds:
Hope [inaudible 00:03:39] completely screwed you up.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, it was PHP and Apache, and basically the LAMP stack on Linux. Yeah, I had some other courses ... like I said, the DBA course, which was pretty nice, and then there was a software management course, which it was all kind of on different methods of software project management, waterfall, agile, stuff like that. I had a course on that kind of stuff.

Ben Edmunds:
Huh. Did you finish the degree?

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, I finished the degree. So that was a four year degree from Arkansas Tech. Bachelor's in information technology. And when I was kind of wrapping up my senior year, I always just assumed I'll be a network admin at some business or hospital or school or whatever. I never really expected to be a programmer. I had never really programmed anything serious. I had programmed my TI-83 calculator in high school, and I knew HTML and basic CSS and stuff, and I build simple websites when I was kid or whatever, but I was not a serious programmer. So I didn't really expect to really go down that road, but then this company from Fort Smith, Arkansas, which was two hours from where I went to school, they came to interview ... because they only hire new college graduates, period. They don't bring on anyone else. It's kind of an interesting setup, but people end up working there for 30 years, so it works out for them.

Taylor Otwell:
And whoever they hire, they put through a six month training program, so I think their approach is to hire really fresh graduates and then just train them to be exactly how they want them to be, and then they work there for a while.

Taylor Otwell:
So I went through that six month training program once they hired me, and that's where I actually learned how to program for real. .NET, COBOL, JCL, ASP Classic and ASP.NET. We did a bunch of different stuff. It was pretty intensive all-day training for six months. And then I would have a few days off to work on random little projects just to get my feet wet. I know the first thing I ever worked on there was COBOL, CICS Screen 2. The phone number field needed validation, it was just letting any random input into the field, and so I was supposed to validate that. It took me two days to figure out how to do that.

Ben Edmunds:
Nice. That's interesting, because that's very old-school way to think about a company, right...

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah.

Ben Edmunds:
... company out of high school, or out of college, and then you stay there for 30 years. That's great.

Taylor Otwell:
Yep. And there we definitely people that ... when I got there, the CEO of that company, who was well into his 60s age-wise, he had started as a programmer in the 70s, and he had just worked there all the way up. They promote within the whole way up to the top. So anyone that's corporate ... a C-level officer there started at the bottom.

Taylor Otwell:
It is a pretty interesting company. It used to be called Arkansas Best Freight. Now it's ArcBest. I think they've renamed themselves.

Ben Edmunds:
Gotcha. That's cool. So I understand why it's changed, and I wouldn't necessarily want to work in the same place for 30 years, but [crosstalk 00:06:59] that's not quite a thing we have anymore where you can work up from the "janitor" up to CEO.

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah. It's crazy, because once I left there, I realized, programmers like me and you, or people that work on open source stuff, are kind of the exception. A lot of programmers ... the vast majority of programmers at that company just went to work, they programmed, and they went home. They did not participate in the Twitter developer scene, they did not participate in the Reddit developer scene, they didn't think about development at all once they got off work.

Taylor Otwell:
There was only a group of maybe 10 out of 150 or 200 programmers that programming was a hobby to them in a way. So yeah, once I left there, I had never really been exposed to open source until I started Laravel all that much, and of course, I had played with coding there a little bit. But I don't know, I didn't really start coding as a hobby until then. I just got off work and went home and did other stuff.

Ben Edmunds:
Interesting. Kind of [inaudible 00:08:14] that some days, right?

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah.

Ben Edmunds:
Some of those things were like, "Do what you love," and "never not be working."

Taylor Otwell:
Yeah, I didn't even have a computer at home for a while. I just had an iPad.

Ben Edmunds:
Really? You didn't take a laptop home or anyt...